


A Question of Metaphysics

by Sixthlight



Series: A Few Years Later [9]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Spoilers for Foxglove Summer, Vampires, background Peter/Nightingale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 18:59:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3739948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter takes an apprentice to clean out a vampire nest. Things get philosophical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Question of Metaphysics

**Author's Note:**

> This falls chronologically after A Statistically Inconclusive Sample.

It was Zach Palmer who called to tell me about the vampire nest in Hounslow, which wasn’t how we usually heard about these things, but I believed him. Zach was totally fucking unreliable in a lot of ways, but something like this, he wasn’t going to mess us around. And nobody, but _nobody_ , in the demi-monde liked vampires – I was pretty sure that some of them thought that cleaning up that sort of mess was the only thing us Isaacs were good for.

Nightingale was doing paperwork in the tech cave when I found him. I’d finally eased him onto computers in the last few years. I think realising that even _Molly_ had joined the Internet-enabled world was what did it. He was a much faster typist than I’d expected - at least until he’d pointed out that typing predated the personal computer by a century or so. He’d learned to use a typewriter back before computer code was a glimmer in Alan Turing or Grace Hopper’s eyes, apparently. 

“I thought that women did the typing, mostly?” I’d had to ask.

“They did,” he’d admitted, “but I spent nearly two decades overseas – I wasn’t trailing a secretary around places like Tibet, and my handwriting was never more than passable.” This was true – you’d think Nightingale would have elegant copperplate, but not even close. Still, he never looked like he particularly enjoyed using the computer. He didn’t check his email more than once a week, for instance. I was thinking about maybe getting him a typewriter-style keyboard for Christmas. I thought he’d like it.

I explained about the call from Zach and said that I was going to head out and take care of it. I’d already called Frank Caffrey and made the arrangements there.

“Which one of the apprentices were you going to take with you?” Nightingale asked.

“Annie,” I said.

“Any particular reason?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll all get a shot at this eventually but it’s one of the more, um, metaphysically challenging aspects of what we do. Aside from the whole deity-or-local-spirit question. Better now than later.”

Annie was the only one of us at the Folly who was a churchgoer on the regular. Matt did Christmas service with his family, I knew that much, but Abigail had never had any use for organised religion unless someone was making her go. I'd never really got the hang of how the different versions of Hinduism worked and Mal didn't talk about her take on it, or she hadn't to me, and there'd been no reason to ask. I had asked Nightingale about it once, and he’d said that while of course he’d been raised Church of England, he’d gotten out of the habit during his Foreign Office years. And besides that the Folly had sometimes had a somewhat uneasy relationship with the Church as a whole, though on a personal level local vicars had been useful contacts (and, more often than not, relatives, given the type of people who’d sent their sons to Casterbrook.) Well, that I could believe. Look what had happened to the previous spirit of the Lugg. 

“Very well, then,” Nightingale said. “I expect we’ll see you back for dinner.”

“Wish me luck,” I replied.

“Better if you’re not in need of it,” he said, but I got a smile as he waved me off.

*

Vampires could hole up just about anywhere, but for some reason suburban houses were the most common lairs. It was yet another reason the outer suburbs gave me the creeps. This time they were in a two-story brick place with a nice bay window, on a mixed-era street of houses longer than they were wide. Frank had parked up in a disabled spot, tsk. I put the Jag in the one across the street; it was that or park ten minutes away, and with any luck we wouldn’t be there long. I probably should have brought the Ford – it’s only about twenty centimetres shorter but it can make all the difference in parking, in London. Much more environmentally friendly, too, being electric and all. But I never take the Ford if I can get away with taking the Jag.

Annie spotted the van, and Frank. She was definitely aware of Frank and his boys as the people who showed up when we required a certain type of conventionally-armed backup – it was just the vampire thing she hadn’t run across yet. “Does this have anything to do with why you emailed us all the safety manual for phosphorus grenades this morning?”

“Yep,” I said. “Did you read it?” She’d been mucking with her phone on the drive over.

“Yes,” she said, but she sounded dubious. “Couldn’t we just use fireballs? For whatever it is?”

“Not for this,” I told her. “This is more one of those bomb-it-from-altitude things. Except we’d never get clearance for that. So grenades it is.”

“Sarge,” Annie said, “what _is_ it, exactly?”

“Oh, did I not say?” I could have sworn I had. Nightingale was into letting people figure things out for themselves and delivering minimal information, but I liked to know what I was up against and I tried to extend the same courtesy to the apprentices. It was just sometimes for routine things like this I forgot. “Vampires.”

“And we’re just going to throw grenades at them?” Annie was pretty sunny, usually, but she was working up some genuine outrage there.

Oh. Right. _That_ was why Nightingale was so cagey. People had all these totally stupid ideas. _Especially_ about vampires. I thought Annie was a little too young for all that Twilight shit, but maybe not.

“Yes,” I said. “And if we’re very lucky we’re going to do it while they sleep. They’re not fae and they’re not _genii locorum_ and they’re not practitioners. This is – pest control.”

“But – they’re people, aren’t they? We can’t just – _execute_ people.”

“No,” I said, opening the car door. Frank was going to wonder what we were waiting around for. “No, Annie, they’re not people.”

*

We got the phosphorus grenades off Frank, and had a brief chat. He knew how this worked, probably better than I did, having done it longer. Everyone associated with the era before I’d joined the Folly was getting on – except for Nightingale, of course – but Frank was only fifty or so, thank god. He’d be around for a while yet.

The curtains were all drawn, of course. I unlocked the gate to the back garden, the same spell I’d seen Nightingale use the first time we’d found a vampire nest. Annie was further along than I’d been then, so I was very quiet with the spell. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust her not to get distracted and more that its precise structure might lead to a lot of questions on the way home. Annie _liked_ languages, and consequently was much better at puzzling out how spells worked through the names of the _formae_ than any of the others. On the other hand, she was better about keeping quiet if you told her there wasn’t time for that.

The garden was as I’d expected – dead lawn, dead flowerbeds, not that they’d had flowers to start with. Dead dog, in a doghouse, slightly mummified. It takes bacteria to make things rot. I pointed them out to Annie and explained about the _tactus disvitae,_ and her face grew paler and more set, especially at the dog. I unlocked the house and we went in. It was quiet, of course, and we moved cautiously. I’d brought a staff; one I’d made myself, in the same model as Hugh Oswald’s old battle staves, though more compact. Still not unlike a pickaxe handle. The weight felt right in my hand.

It was just one, this time, and it wasn’t in the basement, probably because the house didn’t have a basement. It had made a nest in one of the back bedrooms, the one with the smallest window, well-covered with a blanket. There hadn’t been any photos around for easy comparison, but I’d printed out a copy of the driver’s licence associated with the address. Older white woman, long hair in a bun. She’d had boarders. I’d worried about that, but like I said. Just the one.

I got Annie to check the picture – that would help, I thought, seeing the difference between the smooth face of the vampire and the woman who’d once lived here. You couldn’t mistake that for anything like life. I let her check for a pulse and hold a compact mirror off the dresser up to its face – no breath, of course. She didn’t flinch at touching it. Annie's good that way. 

We took a few steps back, into the doorway.

“Now,” I said, keeping my voice low, “we toss the grenades and we get the hell out of here. Quick and quiet, okay?”

“Okay,” Annie whispered back – which was wrong, whispers carry, but a detail for later.

I counted to three, and we pulled the pins. And that was when the vampire woke up.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened to me, but it _was_ the first time when I was the most senior officer in the room. Fortunately, because I was, I was prepared. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t fucking terrifying. Magic is _hard_ around vampires because they hoover it all up – the _tactus disvitae_ thing again – so there's no getting fancy, and thank god I’d brought a staff. And you can’t just throw fireballs at them; if you miss, it makes them stronger. Literally. Hence the phosphorus grenades. If you’re going to use magic, you have to be very smart about how you do it – smart, and restrained.

So I slammed it back down on the bed-nest with _impello palma_ , the minimum required – even that was harder than it should have been - and tossed my grenade.

Annie was still holding her grenade, eyes wide. Having a fucking vampire try and charge you will do that, because they’re fast and they’re mean and they’re not even a little bit human. We all like to think we’ll emulate our favourite action heroes when the chips are down but learning to react to threats like this takes time, and practice, and Annie hadn’t had either.

“Grenade!” I yelled, because grenade, and she jumped about a foot in the air, but lobbed it anyway, and then promptly legged it, as instructed. Thank god for small mercies. I was right behind her, shutting the door behind me with _impello_. That wouldn’t make much difference but it might buy a few seconds. Now I was out of the vampire’s immediate vicinity, I threw some fireballs as I went; not the focused type but my old skinny grenades. These days I could time them down to, oh, five, ten seconds, and if they were good for something they were good at rapidly spreading fire. There was no guarantee the vampire was going to stay in the same room as the phosphorus grenades and I wanted the house well alight.

We made it out and into the back garden, all the way to the end. I could already hear the fire roaring behind us, even before the window-shattering blast of the grenades going off. Behind that, but still audible, came the thin screams of the vampire. I turned, ready, but the flames were flickering up behind the broken of the door we’d come out, and nothing else was visible.

“Is that – is that -” Annie panted. Stress, not exhaustion; we hadn't gone that far. 

“Yes,” I said. “Job done. Now let’s go tell the neighbours some total bollocks while Frank calls in the fire brigade. I always like gas cookers. Gas cookers have _plausibility_.”

*

It went down like I’d told Annie it would. The fire crew showed up, Frank said we were good to go, and we got out of there before the neighbours could ask any inconvenient questions about who exactly we were. Annie still looked a bit white, and that had been closer than I liked. Besides, we’d missed lunch for this. So I found somewhere nearby that sold coffee and sandwiches, and we went and sat on a bench in a nearby park to eat them, the roar of the jets from Heathrow overhead. It wasn’t a half-bad day and I do try not to eat in the Jag, even things that aren’t kebab. Nightingale has very strong feelings about that car. I suppose I do too, I’m just lazier.  

“So that’s what we do with vampires,” I told Annie. “Although that was bad luck, that one waking up. You did okay in there.” I still remembered standing and watching my grenade bounce down the stairs, the first time. She’d at least had the sense to get moving, after that first panicked freeze.

“But they’re -” Annie frowned at her sandwich. “It _looked_ like a person. Sort of. How do you _know_ they’re…who decided it was okay to just kill them like that?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “But there’s been – people tried. Experiments. And…things. They’re not…recoverable, once they get infected. They’re not…alive. There’s some reading, if you want.”

Not about the experiments, though. There was no way I was letting any of the apprentices near _that_. I was sorry enough I’d ever had to look at it.

“Do you think…” Annie said. “D’you think they have souls?”

Well – I’d told Nightingale _metaphysically challenging_ , hadn’t I?

“Not the vampires,” I said. “Everyone else we deal with – the Rivers, the fae, all the rest of it – yeah. They’re _people_ , and we have to treat them like people. And if that means they have souls, sure. They have souls. Even – even sometimes – in more complicated situations. The nice thing about vampires, if there's a nice thing, is that it’s really straightforward, right? They kill people, we kill them. If we don’t kill them they keep killing people. They can’t exist any other way. It’s not always that easy. I wish it was.”

Annie thought about this, frowning. “Could you – give me an example? Of a _more complicated situation_.”

“Well,” I said, and I took a breath. I hadn’t told this story in – I hadn’t ever told this particular story, now I thought about it. Not even to Abigail. But it certainly qualified, and god knows there was a lesson or two in it. “Once – a long time ago now, when I was a PC and I’d only been an apprentice for a few months – we ran into some…some women, in Soho. They’d been killed in the Café de Paris bombing in 1941, during the Blitz.”

“They were ghosts?” said Annie, who had seen ghosts. She’d wanted to know if they had souls, too. I’d been a lot more confident in telling her they were recordings, images. Whatever made a whole person, ghosts didn’t have it.

“No,” I said. “They were as alive as you or me. During the bombing, they’d – we never figured out how exactly – they’d been…transformed. Vampires feed off _vestigia,_ off the magic in living things. These women – they fed off the _vestigia_ created by, well. By jazz musicians.”

“And they killed them?”

“Sometimes. Not always. They were – it screwed with their memories, somehow; they didn’t know how old they were, when we found them, when I found them, didn’t realise they’d been living in Soho draining the life out of their boyfriends for seventy years. Or they acted as if they didn’t know. It wasn’t obvious – the men, they were just dropping dead of what looked like heart attacks, or retiring from the scene in poor health. We only found out because Dr Walid sensed a _vestigium_ on a corpse, and it turned out to have had its brain drained of magic – you know what that looks like. Then we dug into the statistics and more jazzmen were dying than should have been.”

“But how did you find out it was – jazz vampires?” Annie asked, and I winced at that phrase. The self-same one I’d started using, of course, back then.

“Bit of an accident. They were peripherally connected to another case we were working, and…also…I dated one of them. For about a week. We put all the pieces together in the end.”

Looking back, it seemed impossible that I’d only been with Simone for ten days. That was why she’d never given me brain lesions; there just hadn’t been _time_. It had felt longer. The glamour, maybe. I didn’t know to what extent I’d been in control of my actions where she was concerned, to what extent the glamour had made me ignore the connections, ignore the things that didn’t add up. But that was a rabbit hole I had no desire to go down. So I didn’t.

“You _dated_?” Annie blinked. “But you said they were – I mean, I thought you were -” She flushed all over, with her pale Scottish skin, and didn’t say anything else.

 _I thought you were gay_ , was what she wasn’t saying. And to be perfectly fair the only relationship I’d been in since she’d joined the Folly was the one I officially wasn’t having, and Nightingale and I did look just the tiniest bit like a total gay cliché. So I could see where that was coming from. Apart from being totally inaccurate.  

Of course, I was obliged to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about – because, well, not officially happening – so I temporised. “This may come as a surprise, but it’s not necessarily either/or.”

“Right, yes, I know,” said Annie, but she said it to her sandwich, not me, and she was still red as a beetroot.

Although, really, of all the things that separates Nightingale from other people I’ve been with, gender isn’t the key variable.

“Anyway,” I said. “That was more complicated, because they were, were feeding off people – but it wasn’t like the vampires, no _tactus disvitae_ ; they were still, I don’t know, living their lives.” Going to concerts, eating patisserie, earning a living, listening to the radio. Just – never getting any older. Forgetting, every time. The years slipping away. “We thought maybe if they were just separated from the jazz scene, from the thing that…triggered the feeding…maybe they’d revert; just start getting older and die like most people do. Eventually.”

“You…thought?”

“They committed suicide before we had a chance to talk to them about it,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. “When they realised what they’d been – what they were. But I like to think it would have worked, if we’d tried. And that’s what I mean by _complicated_. They – the…the sisters…they were people. Vampires, the ones today; they’re like revenants, or enchantments. They’re not. And so – phosphorus grenades. Believe me, it’s not a preferred option.”

Annie thought about this for a while, and I let her.

“I’m not sure I like that,” she said eventually. “Drawing a line between _people_ and _not people_.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But our job is to protect people. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s really bloody difficult. That’s how it goes. For what it’s worth, these sort of jobs – they’re the least part of what we do. We don’t get any points for property damage.”

“And here I thought joining the magic cops was all going to be fairies and magic wands and maybe a bloody unicorn,” Annie said, having drained the last of her coffee. “So much for that.”

“Shit,” I said. “If it’s ever fairies _and_ magic wands _and_ a unicorn, you’ll be having a _really_ bad day. Remind me to tell you sometime about Herefordshire, and the first time I met DI Croft.”

“There were fairies?”

“Fairies, yep. And magic wands. Well – staves,” I said. “And unicorns. Plural. It was a fucking horror show.”

*

Annie was still a bit quiet at dinner, especially given her usual ebullience. Mal tried to get her talking – she was thoughtful, Mal, if you got her attention - but Matt chose that moment to start bitching at Abigail about something or other she’d done in the lab, I was hazy on the details. This was uncharacteristic of him, but characteristic or not, Abigail was never shy about defending herself, and Nightingale had to employ some very heavy sarcasm before they shut up. There were lots of benefits to having minions, er, apprentices around the place, but I did miss the peace and quiet occasionally.

“Did Annie take the vampire nest badly?” asked Nightingale later on. “She was very quiet, at dinner.”

“I don’t know how you could tell, with those two going at it,” I said. “She’ll be okay. It was just a bit – metaphysically challenging. Like I said.”

“Don’t tell me,” Nightingale said. He’d been reading in bed; I’d just got out of the shower. I’d showered that morning as well, but I always want to shower, after vampire nests. Yeah, I know, they’re sterile – literally, perfectly, in a way no hospital or laboratory can manage. It’s not a literal thing. “She wanted to know if they had souls.”

“Yeah, actually.” I pulled on a t-shirt. I pretty much only wore them to bed these days. Well, I challenge _you_ to be around Thomas Nightingale for as long as I had and not up your sartorial game. “Let me guess – there’s a whole section of the mundane library dedicated to that question?” I had a fairly good grasp of what _could_ be found in there by now, but the theological section had never really drawn my attention.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, placing a bookmark in his book. “But there are some texts.”

“Worth pointing her in their direction?” I pulled back the covers and got into bed.

“Not really,” Nightingale said. “I haven’t looked at any of them since, good Lord, probably since the thirties, but if I recall correctly they were either turgid or inconclusive. Or both.”

“I gave her my take on it, for what it was worth. Anything else, she’ll have to go bother her vicar, or pastor, or…what do Presbyterians have?”

“Pastors, yes. Or elders. Although I’m not sure how much help they’ll be, under the circumstances.”

“Souls are not our problem,” I said firmly, reaching over to turn out the bedside light. “Except in an entirely metaphorical sense.”

“I quite agree,” Nightingale said. “But – if you don’t mind – what _was_ your take on it?”

“People are our problem. And ninety-nine percent of what we deal with involves people. But sometimes it – doesn’t. And I don’t mean _human_ , before you ask. I mean people. Vampires are…not. They’re not even a virus – you can have an argument about whether viruses are alive, believe it or not. Ask Abdul. It’s like you said, once. Pest control.”

There had been experiments, after all, although my German still wasn’t good enough to decipher the details. The thing was – I hadn’t wanted to. But the conclusions had been obvious enough.

“Unsophisticated, perhaps,” Nightingale said. “But it works.”

I thought it was pretty complicated, actually. But what did it matter? It worked.

“You know,” I said, “when we got apprentices I never figured on this sort of thing coming up.”

“Then apparently you weren’t listening to yourself talk for _your_ entire apprenticeship.”

Nightingale, having ensured that I wasn’t going to be able to get up without moving at least two of his limbs, possibly three, settled in. I don’t want to make it sound like we sleep in the same bed every night, like this is a totally normal bedtime routine for us, because we don’t, and it’s not. It just so happened tonight we were both going to bed at the same time and sometimes it’s nice to go to sleep, just sleep, with someone else, especially when your day has involved vampires. That’s all.

It’s six nights out of ten at best. _Maybe_ seven. In winter, when it’s particularly cold.

“Of course not,” I said. “I was too busy listening attentively to you.”

“Hmph,” said Nightingale.

“I ended up talking to Annie about - Simone, and all that,” I said. I hadn’t been meaning to, it just came out. Probably because I was in my own bed, with Nightingale doing his octopus impression, feeling all – all safe. And…cared about. And shit like that.

“Oh,” Nightingale said.

“I told her that sometimes we had _more complicated situations_ than vampires _,_ and she wanted an example. And so.”

“Did it help?” he asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know. She got a bit sidetracked by the idea of me and Simone having, you know. Dated.”

“Because -?”

“- because Simone was, you know, female. Actually.”

It’s really hard to hide the fact you’re laughing from someone you have full-body contact with, so I thumped Nightingale with my free arm. “Oi. You’re not the one who had to tactfully explain bisexuality to an embarrassed Scotswoman.”

“And so,” he said once he was done being amused at my expense. “ _Did_ it help?”

“It’s an important example,” I said. “Of the kind of decisions we have to make. I’m not saying our lives wouldn’t be much easier if we could just throw phosphorus grenades at all our problems, but. We can’t. Also, imagine the DPS investigations.”

“I know,” Nightingale said, and he did, as well as me and maybe more. Those seventy years when it was him and nobody else, no-one to talk it over with, no-one to suggest another way; just him and all the problems magical London could throw at him, and his own conscience.

We both went quiet, and I was nearly asleep when he spoke again.

“Did you really send them the safety manuals?” he murmured in my ear.

“Yeah,” I said. “Bet you didn’t know phosphorus grenades _had_ safety manuals.”

“They’re not meant to be _safe_.”

“That doesn’t mean,” I said – or slurred, rather, because I was hovering on that dim edge of sleep – “that we can’t try.”

I thought I felt him smile against my skin, but maybe I was already dreaming.

**Author's Note:**

> The “typewriter keyboard” Peter mentions is [this sort of thing](http://www.qwerkytoys.com). Typewriters were invented in the 1860s, so I totally believe Nightingale would have used them, and I think he’d find something like that much easier than a modern computer keyboard.


End file.
